So I have always heard that under no circumstances whatsoever are you to drink seawater or urine.
The explanation has always been that the body loses more water getting rid of the salts and in the end you are more dehydrated than if you had not drank anything.
But…
On more than one occasion I have seen Bear Grylls on TV drinking his own urine in some desert. He says that you are not supposed to do it, except in extreme circumstances. And it always makes good TV to see him guzzling hot pee out of a long water bottle he fashioned out of a recently vanquished rattler’s skin.
What’s the Straight Dope on this? Is it verboten to drink pee or are there ever survival situations when it would help?
I once heard somewhere that Gandhi drank a pint of his own urine every day. But I can’t remember where I heard it, and I don’t think I’ve ever come across this interesting factoid anywhere else. It’s nonsense, right? :dubious:
It was Moraji Desai, a Prime Minister of India. I don’t know if it was a pint, but he was open about drinking his own urine for what he believed to be health benefits.
Funny story: he was late to a high level international meeting. The Australian PM quipped, “He was probably out on the piss* all night”
*On the piss = getting drunk
Just to clarify my OP, I am not asking about day-to-day drinking of pee, so sterility and long-term health benefits are not in question.
I am asking about a survival situation where you are becoming dehydrated. Specifically, I am asking if Laudenum’s statement below is true or false, hopefully with a cite.
Cyborg, by Martin Caidin (actually a pretty good novel, way more serious than the stupid tv show that followed). Funny that I thought of the same thing.
I would think urine would be so salty it’d do more harm than good to drink it, unless it’s very watery pee – which would only happen if you were already well-hydrated. So if you were very thirsty, and had somebody else there who’d been drinking water all day to the point where his urine was almost colorless, and you drank his pee, it might work.
Maybe Bear Grylls just uses any excuse to drink his pee.
I’m going with the US Army Field Manual, the head of the largest tracking and wilderness survival school in the U.S. and the president of the Texas Urological Society before Bear Grylls.
Honest? I think it’s because washing your hands often (regardless of if you’ve been urinating or not) is a good thing, public health wise. And private health wise. To encourage people to wash their hands with soap and water several times a day, we encourage them to do it after using the restroom. Not because they’ve contaminated themselves with a dirty wang, but because, hey, there’s a sink right there, too. If you’re going to wash up six times a day to dilute the bacteria you gather from touching people, papers, money, light switches and everything else, you might as well do it while you’re in that room with soap and water anyway.
It’s like taking your birth control pill after you brush your teeth everyday. The two are not directly linked for medical reasons, but you’ll more likely remember to do it if it’s consistent and coincidentally linked with something else you already do.
Urine, coming out of the body, is most definitely sterile, absent infection or illness. Your hands, however, are not.
Because, unless you’re using an autoflush toilet or urinal, the last thing you touch is the handle . . . which was also the last thing *everyone else *touched, with Og-knows-what on his hands.
